Korenizatsiya

Logic of the policy

Korenizatsiya comes from the Russian for rooted or native and names the policy of bringing non-Russian nationalities into the administration, party, and educational institutions of their own republics. It was formally adopted at the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923, where Stalin defined Great Russian chauvinism as the main danger.

The logic came out of the problem of handling the imperial inheritance. Winning the trust of previously oppressed nations required more than a declaration of legal equality: the administrative apparatus itself had to operate in that nation's language and be run by cadres drawn from it.

Instruments

Three instruments were used. First, language policy made the use of local languages obligatory in administration, courts, and education in the republics and autonomous regions. Scripts were devised for languages that had none or whose orthography was unsettled, and through the 1920s many were written in Latin characters.

Second, cadre policy set target proportions for recruiting and promoting members of the local nationality in the party and administration. Third, territorial policy created national soviets and national districts, giving administrative units to minority groups too small for a republic.

Reversal

From the mid-1930s the direction reversed. National cadres were removed on charges of local nationalism, and the leaderships of party and cultural institutions in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Central Asian republics were replaced on a large scale. The national operations of 1937 and 1938 targeted border-region minorities collectively.

Language policy changed in the same years. Russian was made a compulsory subject in all schools in 1938, and in the later 1930s languages written in Latin characters were converted to Cyrillic. As Russian centrism was restored in the official narrative, the term Great Russian chauvinism itself disappeared from official discourse.

What korenizatsiya left behind is twofold. Even after the policy was reversed, the languages, schooling, and cultural institutions organized at republic level remained, and that institutional base operated as the condition in which national identity reproduced itself. The speed with which republic-level national movements politicized in the late 1980s is connected to this inheritance.